Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 17, 2014

With the current low cost of entry, nimble competitors appear quickly and seize the high ground of your existing customers and potential. Every aspect of every product requires development, testing, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution. It’s tough for an elephant to be agile.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

Who can I hire later? Or if you’re building consumer electronics the key activities might be: low cost hardware design, high volume manufacturing, user interface design, consumer branding and retail distribution. But what about for us, a consumer hardware hardware company? How do I decide who I need to have on board on day one?

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 27, 2015

With the current low cost of entry, nimble competitors appear quickly and seize the high ground of your existing customers and potential. Every aspect of every product requires development, testing, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution. It’s tough for an elephant to be agile.

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Hearpreneur

JANUARY 13, 2021

Throughout the different phases of the pandemic, we have spent even more time with our existing customers and actively sought out their advice on how we can make our platform and services better as this distributed work environment continues. 8-Stay agile. Thanks to Ablorde Ashigbi, 4Degrees ! Photo Credit: Tony Tullio.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2021

Make sure your hiring practices include diversity, inclusion, and equity. Practice your agility. In my experience, many companies today still eschew innovation in the ranks, and count on fixed ways of doing things to squeeze out costs. Some of these companies no longer exist. Innovate in real time to protect your business.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

By which they mean: Without stupid rules that assume employees are dumb or evil, without everything taking ten times longer than it should, without wall-to-wall meetings, without resorting to hiring anything less than the top 1% of the talent pool, and so on. It’s a big reason why they move quickly. No, it’s a colossal failure.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 15, 2017

Agile businesses have moved to the cloud because of its scalability, efficiency and reliability, amongst other benefits. As the cloud becomes increasingly common and the data deluge shows no signs of slowing down, the good old firewall is simply no longer sufficient for protecting the highly distributed assets of the enterprise.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

For example they can reduce component cost, introduce a line extension or create new versions of the existing product. For example, Coke added snack foods, which could be distributed through its existing distribution channels. And to keep executing large organizations hire employees with a range of skills and competencies.

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Transformify

SEPTEMBER 12, 2017

Post Brexit, many companies in the UK consider distributed teams overseas as an alternative to the shrinking talent pool and high recruitment costs in Britain. Scrum, Agile, Product Management. Scrum, Agile, Problem Analysis, Business Catalyst, Business Analytics. What are the most common skills in each category?

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Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

Cell phone companies continue to entice users with low-priced, higher-quality plans, but these plans have a hidden cost. When you add up the costs of these bundles, you'll find that you're paying for services you'll never use. A cell phone company that offers low-cost services while giving more value can break this.

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Artificial Inteligence Entrepreneur Technical Review Security 109

sivers.org

JUNE 25, 2010

Derek Sivers about me blog books email list contact How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen 2010-06-19 Do you have an idea for a website, online business, or application, but need a programmer to turn that idea into reality? Youll estimate time and cost better. Hire one from each. The requirements are as follows.”

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. So far, I have found "lean startup" works better with the entrepreneurs Ive talked to than "agile startup" or even "extreme startup.") Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.

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Hearpreneur

JANUARY 5, 2022

Going green will benefit us greatly in the long run, given its initial high costs. . It's important to keep business agile. I believe that to be able to contact customers efficiently and cost effectively, organizations need to understand their customer categories. These will be our primary goals entering 2022.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. What’s the customer acquisition cost? Who recommends a sale? Who is the decision maker? Who is the economic buyer?

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Hearpreneur

JANUARY 26, 2022

To prevent hackers from gaining access to your business's checking account, use low-cost software and dual controls to strengthen your payment processes. Prezi hired the former director of product from Pixar to build a more cinematic video meeting experience. Think of the agility that comes with CAI, etc.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth." Expo SF (May.

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The Startup Magazine

MAY 30, 2019

A new kind of company, built to leverage new technologies, new media channels, new working practices and new consumer markets, Crowdify is agile, adaptive, responsive and forward thinking — but also grounded and focused on product and brand strategy and return on marketing investment.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) So what’s wrong the product development model? Where Are the Customers?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. What about a hardware business with some long-lead-time components?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market. Agile software development.

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Carpe Diem. Wide Adoption.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

One is explaining the world as it used to work: the importance of gatekeepers, the scarcity implied by limited distribution, and the resulting quality bar that the industry is so proud of. Mostly it is the time and expense required to create the means of distribution for that industry. It’s just taking some longer than others.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

And so this very agile, iterative process of bringing new technologies and prototyping systems. But we haven’t necessarily trained our acquisition people, incented them to have a greater risk tolerance that’s required for this agile development of emerging technologies. And you have to incent that.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2012

1940’s – movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets. It was 75 years until studios had to deal with technology changing their platform and distribution channel.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Other companies accomplish this by hiring a large staff of content production experts - and get a very good result. Plus, we saw some of the intrinsic limitations of supporting such a large staff: slower cycle times, higher cost basis, and - most importantly - the ability to serve only a limited number of customer segments.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 22, 2020

Requiring every employee to be physically on-site near other people has some well-known drawbacks – lengthy commute times and high associated costs, limited flexibility in who and where you can hire, etc. He has managed award winning, distributed, remote marketing teams spanning the globe for over 20 years.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. The cost will be felt in jobs -- thousands of new jobs that could have been created here, but werent. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Our tests suite takes nine minutes to run (distributed across 30-40 machines). Ship more infrequently While this may decrease downtime (things break and you roll back), the cost on development time from work and rework will be large, and mistakes will continue to slip through. On commit automatically run all tests. But it worked.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 25, 2019

They needed a way to use their website to its full potential, but they either didn’t have time or money to hire a marketer. So, I came up with an idea of using social proof to help business owners do marketing, without hiring a marketer. When I sold my first house, I hired a realtor to do it for me. Photo Credit: Manny Vetti.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

MogileFS - "Distributed (meta) file system. link] And - of course - going through [link] and reading up on the various different approaches different companies have (successfully) taken towards getting scalability at reasonably low cost. Three of my favorite: memcached - an in-memory object caching system. Pay less for storage.

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Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. Finally the amount of capital needed to take a drug to FDA trials could be enormously expensive, at least 10x more than startup costs at an electron-based company. Lean VC’s are expert in on-line distribution, Agile and Customer Development.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I know plenty of people who prefer more advanced source control system, but my belief is that many agile practices diminish the importance of advanced features like branching. Its not that the idea behind them is wrong, but I think agile team-building practices make scheduling per se much less important. Youd better. Expo SF (May.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh). But along the way, something strange happened. And what about if deployment takes forever?

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Github - Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs Pivotal Tracker – Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. Bontq – hosted bug tracking and project management needs. Reply Jarek , on February 27, 2011 at 11:51 pm said: What about CRM?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. I was building a new startup in 1999, and wanted to do it right. 1 comments: flixsterwidgettest said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an internet connection. This is just like a startup to me, complete with distribution and product development challenges, ecosystem design and many, many customers. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Because they have no presence in the market, they have to find distribution channels to bring in customers. They know how much it costs to bring in a customer and they know how much money they can expect to make on each one. Our cost to acquire a customer on AdWords was only a few cents. Go on an agile diet quickly.

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